httpv:\/\/www.youtube.com\/watch?v=DL5tjGK-x-g<\/p>\n
Glenn Beck exhibits his brute talent for race-baiting and incitement to violence Frye in Words with Power<\/em>:<\/p>\n When the rhetorical occasion narrows down from the historical to the immediate, as at rallies and pep talks, we begin to see features in rhetoric that account for the suspicion, even contempt, with which it was regarded so often by Plato and Aristotle.\u00a0 Let us take a rhetorical situation at its worst.\u00a0 In intensive rhetoric with a short-term aim, there is a deliberate attempt to put the watchdog of consciousness to sleep, and the steady battering of consciousness become hypnotic, as the metaphor of “swaying” an audience suggests.\u00a0 A repetition of cliche phrases is designed to bring about a form of dissociation.\u00a0 The dead end of all this is the semi-autonomous monster called the mob, of which the speaker is now the shrieking head.\u00a0 For a mob the kind of independent judgment appealed to by dialectic is an act of open defiance, and is normally treated as such.<\/p>\n We spoke of the endlessness of argument in the conceptual area, but rhetoric has an ad hominem<\/em> or personal weapon available to stop argument.\u00a0 One may be told, “You just say that because you’re an atheist, a Communist, a Jew, a Christian, or because you had a castrating mother,” etc., etc.\u00a0 Such verbal weapons are illegitimate in the conceptual mode, where an impersonal\u00a0 basis is assumed.\u00a0 But they play an important role in ideology–not always a sinister or violent role, as one may also be led to examine one’s position to see what limitations are built into it.\u00a0 (CW 26, 32-3)<\/p><\/blockquote>\n That last point is subtle and reassuring.\u00a0 There’s nothing necessarily <\/em>wrong with ad hominem <\/em>arguments in the right context — we may indeed be called upon to rethink our stand on issues in light of personal biases.\u00a0 Satire, of course, completely depends upon the ad hominem<\/em> affront, and it is perhaps the most direct assault on the inadequacies of ideology that literature affords.<\/p>\n And that’s the difference I see between left and right in the most readily available public discourse.\u00a0 The left tweaks the nose of the right with fact-based mockery, and the right responds with death threats and talk of “second amendment remedies<\/a>,” which predictably leads to violence.\u00a0 The left has Jon Stewart whose satire is usually most devastating when running a piece of footage that provides a missing piece of crucial information; the right has Glenn Beck whose involuted paranoid fantasies seem only intended to leave his audience unmoored and waiting for him to tell them who to hate next.\u00a0 While it’s true that you don’t want to mess with Matt Taibbi<\/a>, he’ll\u00a0 never threaten you with violence or unleash a horde of angry minions upon you.\u00a0 But if you cross Sarah Palin<\/a>, she’s capable of putting a target on you while barking “RELOAD” to an already irrational mob.\u00a0 One is acceptable and enriching civilized behavior, the other is psychopathy.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" httpv:\/\/www.youtube.com\/watch?v=DL5tjGK-x-g Glenn Beck exhibits his brute talent for race-baiting and incitement to violence Frye in Words with Power: When the rhetorical occasion narrows down from the historical to the immediate, as at rallies and pep talks, we begin to see features in rhetoric that account for the suspicion, even contempt, with which it was regarded […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":20,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","_links_to":"","_links_to_target":""},"categories":[2,33,79,135],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-19901","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-america","category-current-events","category-ideology","category-rhetoric"],"yoast_head":"\n
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